Hi guys, Previously, I had three 1TB drives in my desktop using the Intel's southbridge RAID for storage. The only problem with that is every time Windows Vista took a dump, I would be in jeopardy of corrupting the storage space; thus, I decided to have a dedicated machine just for serving up files.
I now have a 3ware 9650SE 16 port host controller and currently four 2TB Western Digital WD2002FYPS drives (I also have a leftover drive from an old machine that's currently the boot drive), Supermicro server MB and a Celeron 440 2GHz chip (primarly because it's 35watts and I wanted to minimize power usage when the machine sat idle). I was weary about using a Microsoft OS as I wanted it to be reliable and also didn't want to have to pay for another license, etc. I tried FreeNAS and it was ok, but somewhat limited in what you can do with it. I have a squeezebox and would want to install their SqueezeCenter server to server up lossless compressed audio files. I was also intrigued by ZFS after reading so much about it. I did try around with creating a raidz1 zpool, but then learned that the current implementation is somewhat limited in that you can't expand the raidset. Using a raidz storage pool would also not take advantage of the 3ware's dedicated hardware for computing parity, etc. Anyway, I successfully created a RAID5 set using three drives and created a zpool. I then migrated the RAID5 set to add an additional 2TB drive (took 3 days!). The server is currently down because I needed to use the RAM elsewhere, but after expanding the storage area, the filesystem still stayed the original size using the three 2TB drives. I tried finding a way to get the full space allocation, but it seems that many use simple SATA ports and the raidz solution. I'm also a n00b, so any advice would be greatly appreciated. If you think I'm going down the wrong path, I would like to hear it. TIA, Chester -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
